Analytics Since Site Launch in 2007

posted Sep 15, 2015, 5:32 PM by Scott Cooley

Eight years is a good enough length of time, one might think, to take a look at the Google Analytics. I put in some dates and clicked a few things in there, and here are some statistics about visitors to this Web site.

Global

Takeaways

The big takeaway was I've apparently got some work to do in Iceland, Greenland, Africa, the Middle East and Kazhakstan. ;-) It was interesting to see I am big in India, Brazil, and China...at first...until I realized those countries have a ton of people. UK, Canada, and Netherlands were particularly pleasing to me...not sure why exactly, but I like those countries. Russia was more surprising than Germany, I guess, since I've become aware Germans have purchased my music before via CD Baby (a good service, by the way). 870 returning visitors is all good. The total sessions count was impressive overall.

US

Takeaways

Obviously, North Dakotans don't know what they're missing! ;-) California, New York, Texas and Illinois are not surprising due to population I suppose. Aside from North Dakota, Virginia is the biggest surprise here, since I know a few people in Florida and Ohio. #4 there on the pageviews list is from me logging in to this site and viewing 967 pages, which doesn't seem like that much, but over an 8-year span, I believe it since I log in, make a quick tweak, then log out fairly frequently, like at least once a month thinking back. #3 on the pageviews I figure must be from those web crawling spider robot deals, because even though I provide links to the sitemap here and there throughout the site, I doubt that many people would click on it to see the directory of every single page in an expandable tree. It was great to see so many people checking out the Store page!!

Exits

Takeaways

Ah-ha! 115 people almost signed up for my Mailing List, and then bailed out. Damn, I gotta simplify that page. Exiting the Store page could be a good thing, since the shopping cart exits you from that page to Amazon to check out when buying a CD.

Conclusions

This was just the tip of the iceberg as far as available intelligence data about this web site goes. There are endless stats, charts, graphs, etc. that you can configure and create in this tool, and these were just the easy ones. I was able to see the activity spike at around the time I added content, posted a blog, had a new album release and told people about it, or posted something to Facebook. I should use Facebook more, but I just can't bring myself to log in more than a few times a year. A lot of the traffic came from there, but most came from Google, Bing, and Yahoo searches. Most people know you can also find out what types of browsers and operating systems visitors use and other things like that which didn't really interest me. Since I don't have any ad campaigns configured in there, I didn't have the sales-oriented data available for conversions and things like that. Amazon, Google Play/Music and Apple Music/iTunes reports are available as well, but I can see in my accounts when I have sales, which I check from time to time, and some MP3 services like Bandcamp automatically notify me, so I don't really need it. Most of it is either confusing to figure out how to use, uses unfamiliar business or technical terminology, or just didn't seem all that important to me to drill down into or run reports against. Not that it isn't an awesome, powerful, and free tool, this Google Analytics. Since the domain name is a nominal yearly fee, and the rest is of no cost, the web site is just a fun way for me to mess around and pretend I'm this important indie rock artist or singer-songwriter and learn about web-related stuff, some of which I find interesting. Now that I can just about sell enough music to cover the cost of distributing it, I'm nearing a break-even stage with this hobby from word-of-mouth alone. If I would only invest in marketing/promotion/advertising/publicity stuff, who knows what the future upticks in the sales trends on charts and graphs would look like? Nice to think about a little future growth with this thing. I wonder if I could recoup that investment risk though. Well, I'm happy with my little songwriting/home recording hobby and making the music available for people to discover for now, so I'll keep at it I guess.

Overall, I'm really happy the site I work hard on has had so many visitors - both new and returning. I guess I need to find more free ways to promote it online to get even more...from Greenland and North Dakota! Maybe write more songs about cold weather situations. Hmmm...not a bad idea, I'll get to work on that.